Gothic Terrorists: The Inside View

For most of its history, Hollywood has indulged its audience's fascination with terrorism, creating, in the process, what Tony Shaw calls, with equal parts sardonic humour and exasperation, ‘filmic “terrortainment”’ (Shaw 2014, 3). In The Whip Hand (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1951), an idyllic American small town harbours a conspiracy to create an army of terrorists. Their nefarious nature as communists is barely distinguishable from the Nazi saboteurs that had been haunting wartime cinema not too long before (e.g. Saboteur, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). The embedded terrorist awaiting activation would make a spectacular comeback in The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962). Its tortured eponymous assassin would bring the vague anxieties lingering after the Korean War home to American politics; a remake (dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004) would update the topic for the Bush years. While cartoonishly evil terrorists would pop up in action films of the post-Cold War era (e.g. James Cameron's True Lies, 1994), the thriller, especially in its handling of international espionage, would imagine characters more subtly seduced into terrorism (like Damian Lewis's case study of a POW-turned-assassin by way of Stockholm Syndrome in the TV series Homeland, 2011). At his most vaguely defined – as in the television series Jericho (CBS, 2006), in which it is never quite clear if terrorist attacks are to be expected from within or without the eponymous Kansas small town – the terrorist is pure paranoid potential, nowhere to be seen but present everywhere. Not only does this vagueness, this lack of clearly defined definitional boundaries, make the terrorist a more monstrous figure, drawing on abjection's scandalising power to transgress categories and boundaries;1 by demanding updated concrete iterations to fit new contexts, this vagueness also retains the terrorist's flexibility as a trope, allowing both the left and the right to mobilise it within its respective political discourse. Hence, terrorists in Hollywood productions, and in American culture at large, are more ubiquitous than these few examples would suggest. Their gothic features are also dramatically amplified by genres ranging from male melodrama to the thriller and science fiction. Whenever terrorists are at their most gothic, they are most deeply anchored in the villainous iconography of popular culture.

In its focus on hyperbolic and tumultuous emotional affect, on anxiety and paranoia, on destabilisation and violence, the default story about terrorism told in these films follows one of the basic scripts of the gothic.